BA Graphic Design – Level 5

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Lighting with Houdini + Shaders

Types of LightPoint Light Emits light from a point in all directions and is similar to a light bulb.

Spot Light Radiates a cone shaped beam of light from a point in a certain direction. Area Light Automatically distributes a number of light sources over a specified area. There are five area light shapes to choose from.

Line/Tube Lights are distributed along the length of a straight line.

Grid Lights are distributed over the area of a plane. This is the default shape created by the area light.

Disk Lights are distributed over the area of a disk.

Sphere Lights are distributed along the outside surface of a sphere. You can put objects inside this shape for an overall soft shadow look that is similar to global illumination irradiance.

Distant Light / Environment Light Casts light into the scene as if from a surrounding hemisphere or sphere. The default environment light is a hemisphere; however, you can make it a full sphere by turning on the Use full sphere for environment checkbox on the Area Light Options sub-tab of the Light tab in the parameter editor. You can also change the sampling density in the Area Samples parameter on the Area Light Options sub-tab of the Light tab in the parameter editor. The position of the light does not matter. You can rotate the light object to orient the light source. With no rotation, hemisphere lights are oriented to cover the region above the XZ plane. An environment light may use a texture map to provide illumination from an environment map. With no rotation, the environment map is oriented so that the top face aligns with the positive Y axis.

I spent 99% of my time making shaders for my scene, trying to get the reflectivity, specular, displacement and textures correct. I literally spent 2 weeks looking into these over xmass, have over 1000 variations and that was prittty much all i had to show for 2 weeks work… a few shaders and 1000’s of renders!